Book Breathes Life Into '88 Presidential Candidates

August 09, 1992|By OWEN McNALLY; Courant Staff Writer

When George Bush, as a young Navy pilot in World War II, is shot down and is wondering if rescuers will ever fish him out of the sea, Richard Ben Cramer puts you right there alongside the future president on his bobbing raft in "What It Takes."

When young Bob Dole is severely wounded in the Italian campaign in World War II, with one arm all but blown off, Cramer again puts you right there among the fear and agony.

And later you're right alongside young Dole as he literally puts himself back together after the war in his small, allAmerican hometown of Russell, Kan., painfully transforming his shattered life into a Frank Capra-like tale of success.

Cramer virtually puts you in the skin of his subjects, six politicians who campaigned for the presidential nomination in 1988. He doesn't write so much about the campaign as the campaigners.

A Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist, Cramer is no political pedant hung up on polls, demographics, boring graphs and rancid pie charts.

Cramer is an old-fashioned biographer who has unearthed enormous amounts of material about his subjects. Then, in the snappy New Journalism style of a Tom Wolfe, he recounts his meticulously researched tale in novelistic form.

Cramer conducted more than 1,000 interviews as he zeroed in on his subjects, two Republicans: then-Vice President Bush and the Senate's GOP Leader Bob Dole; and four Democrats: former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Cramer takes a dim view of the run for presidential glory, calling it a "quadrennial bloodbath." The ritual, he warns, deprives candidates of every shred of their old lives as they put everything on the line, including their families.

Cramer thinks the process is flawed because of its tidal waves of publicity and the killing pace that locks candidates "in the bubble" that removes them from true concerns of everyday life.

Candidates are surrounded by what Cramer derisively calls "suits." These are big-time experts who smother them with advice. These "suits," plus the press, which is depicted as a pack of gossip-hungry jackals, are the villains in the book. The press

thrives on the cheap and tawdry and presents candidates through a glass darkly, even sleazily, Cramer believes.

Cramer sides strongly with Gary Hart, saying he was victimized by what the author calls "the Karacter Kops," Fourth Estate swat teams more anxious to know whom Hart slept with than to report on his political ideas.

A major disappointment is that Cramer did not have enough time to devote to portraying Jesse Jackson, who makes only cameo appearances in the book.

The book's unifying narrative thread recounts the 1988 campaign, focusing on the primary struggles. But the real meat here is the flashbacks focusing on the triumphs and tragedies of his six characters.

Cramer's book is often brilliant and entertaining but is sometimes exasperating with its obsessive flood of details. If Dole stares at a carpet, you can bet that Cramer will dwell on its details and pedigree.

Generally, Cramer's novelistic prose is fresh and vivid. But it can become so mannered that it sounds like a parody of the way Tom Wolfe wrote 25 years ago.

Even though he has a knack for deft, epigrammatic images -- Jack Kemp as "a blow-dried windbag" or John Sununu as "the Rasputin-of-the-Rocky-North" -- he sometimes falls back on easy cliches. Most notable is his relentless abuse of the phrase, so-and-so went "ballistic," or its tepid variant, so-and-so "went nuclear."

Even more irritating is his onomatopoeic recounting of dialogue, particularly Dole's speech, which comes out sounding Kansan-Neanderthal. Dole is always beginning sentences with an "Aagh" or a "Gaghh."

Here, verbatim, is perhaps the most extreme or Edmund Lear-like sample of Dole dialogue as reported by Cramer:

" `Chuckeeeeeee!"

"Then he [Dole] settled back again.

" `La-di-da...la-di-da...bup-bup-Bahhh!" Despite its irritating elements, "What It Takes" is an irresistible biography.

Even if you loathe the campaigners' political views, you can't help but relate to them as fellow human beings.

In his own bloated yet often scintillating way, Cramer has done for the 1988 campaign trail what Tolstoy did for the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 in his "War and Peace."